The Yeti\’s Cyber Smithy

Their connection was made at one of the annual events I once hosted; The Real Witches Ball. Evidently Mystie Dragonfly and Davin are both into whips and chains. Let me be clear no problem with that. Well, what there was a problem with is that Mystie Dragonfly and Davin evidently did some of their S and M thing (complete with black leather toys) in front of an 11 year old girl. Her father was very put off by this and publicly stated his discontent. My stance was that I had never thought we needed an official rule against such conduct in front of children, but that evidently we did. My reason for not being angry with Davin is that it seemed as if he had no reason to think that such conduct was unacceptable. Although I would like to think that my sense of what is proper behavior were automatically known to people around me, I realize such is not the case.

Mystie Dragonfly was a member of Pagan Nation who for a time had aspired to create a Pagan Community center in Columbus, OH. I had publicly informed her that it was my opinion that she should team up with an organization like the Pagan Community Council of Ohio to achieve that goal because maintaining such a thing would be a fulltime job. As she was on disability and reportedly not able to maintain a fulltime job, it seems that creating such an establishment would amount to defrauding the federal government. Beyond that statement, I have very little to do with the events which followed; so if my facts are a bit skewed on this part of the story, I apologize.

Aerohstotle (aka Pickle) was close to Mystie Dragonfly at the time he called Aimee to warn her of Mystie Dragonfly’s plans. Something about a cursed doll to be given to my daughter Aubreyahna to get back at me for making that public statement. Aimee was so outraged that I just kind of stayed out of it. Trust me on this one, when my wife gets angry the best thing to do is stay out of the way and maybe duck. Anyway, I later found out that although I had simply made the statement and never thought a thing about it, many people started not only identifying where Mystie Dragonfly worked but reporting her to what ever agencies overseas disability checks. Now I don’t think there is anything wrong with reporting abuse of public assistance, but I had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Still, evidently Mystie Dragonfly thought I was behind her months or maybe years of trouble resulting from it. Sometime later, I was contacted by an associate named Justin who works in the field of mental health. He warned me that her myspace account was the type of warning signs that he was reading about at the time. I looked at the page and was absolutely amazed to find that I was the subject of post after post about how she was going to get even with me for everything that had gone wrong in her life. There were spells and curses, a declaration that the injuries I acquired when my store was flooded where her doing.

Enter Jill Medicine Heart Combs, stage left. You might recall this is the former Vice President of CUUPS and current Regional Director for the Ohio Valley of the Pagan Pride Project who decided to make a poppet of me and fire 80 rounds of ammunition into it. She publicly announced her plans, claimed that board members (either PPP or CUUPs) participated in her magickal plans, then changed the story over and over again.

Well, Mystie Dragonfly was at the time involved with PPP. She and Jill Medicine Heart were listed as friends at Myspace and a bunch of other associations can be found.

Now then, in that thread that caused me to think about all of this, Gina asked a question:

Gina asked: “What type of person gives a innocent baby a dream pillow stuffed with poisonious herbs??”

Well, the answer is Pagans do. Not all pagans. But there is this very dangerous ideology present within the pagan community. If you were a head / freak / beatnik (depending on your generational terms) you will probably recall hearing something along the lines of: ‘Oh, he’s OK I got high with him last night’. If your highschool social group was different then mine, let me explain. People who smoked marijuana as part of their culture considered the consumption of that recreational drug to be the definition of who is a member of that social group. Of course anyone who is a member of your social group must be a good person, so if they smoke weed they must be Ok. It seems the same is true of the pagan community.

Where Gina was repulsed by the idea that someone might do something like this, most people just hear a person call themselves ‘pagan’ and figure they are good people. In fact, when someone points out that there is a problem with some members of the pagan community as I have done here in my blog, people are very quick to defend those people and attack me because they feel it is an attack on their social group.

The truth is there is a much larger social group which is always guilty of the things which are pointed out in the smaller social groups. That group being humanity. Although it is sometimes tempting to divorce humanity, doing so is not practical. For this reason, we tend to form smaller groups with more clearly defined rules for social conduct. Things like the Catholic Church come to mind. Not that it is my particular social group of choice, but it lends itself to the next issue as demonstrated by my Catholic Mother.

Although most people are quick to associate all Catholics with people who believe what the Church dictates when it comes to morals and ethics, there are certainly those Catholics who feel differently. It is these members who cause the Church to grow and change with the times. An example, the word ‘faggot’ once indicated a bundle of wood which would be tossed on the fire. It came to indicate a homosexual when the Church was fond of burning gay folk. Leap forward to the last Pope and we find that the Church had demanded that parents NOT forsake their gay children. In fact, although the Catholic Church still feels homosexuality is a sin (as is any non-procreative sex) it encourages gay men to become priests thus living their life in sinless celibacy. No, it is not as progressive as it should be; however today’s Catholic Church is a far cry from what it was a couple hundred years ago.

Mom is a Catholic. She is a Catholic that thinks women should be allowed to become priests, priests should be allowed to wed, no form of love between adults is a sin, abortion and birthcontrol should be allowed, and well you get the picture. It is women like her that cause the church to change and grow with the times; amending its views on morals and ethics. Yes it is a slow process, but you might recall the former Pope apologized for the Church’s atrocities against women and the current Pope has recently reevaluated sin to create a modern view which includes crimes against the Earth herself. Wow!

The flip side to this is that if the organization does not have a clear set of guidelines for social conduct, well it is much easier to change the moral and ethical fiber of the organization. This is the case with the pagan movement and other non-organized groups. While we run away from the embrace of organized religion because we do not like the confines of its dictates; in so doing we have lost the value of common social ethics. But being a social creature, we need something to bring us together.

In organized religions, members bind together based on their common sense of what is right and wrong with a few people there to promote that slow progress (Mom). With unorganized religion, we kind of band together under the title of the social order with a sense of morals and ethics which are practically led by those few people who promote a much faster change. Oh, he is pagan he is cool. But because we share so few commonalties with each other, we seek to build our social structure on something else.

In this case, the thing all of these people have in common is that I have had some distasteful exchange with them. So now they have a mission; to promote the ‘I hate A.J. club’ because it is what binds them all together.

For a time it seems Davin was part of this club. Although I do not recall visiting his website to find the rants I have been told about, it seems there was a period in which he echoed dozens of things Mystie Dragonfly had put forth about how evil I am. Evidently, the content is no longer there. I figure the man moved on and realized I had never really yanked his chain to the extent he once thought. Frankly, I had found many of his posts prior to the falling out to be very well spoken and informed. So maybe he resigned from the club. No clue really.

So what type of people do these things? We pagan people do these things. Why? Well because the word pagan is used to mean a social group, not a group of people brought together by a common sense of morals, ethics, or perception of proper social conduct. Consider the ranting of Jill Medicine Heart Combs shortly after she lost her position as Vice President of CUUPs. She announced to the world that she still hob knobbed with famous people. I think that was in the Frost’s blog but I forget. Evidently, what is important to her is her social standing and not what that social standing is based on.

This is why the people that I love, my kith and kin, are made up of a rainbow of religions. You see I am not so interested in the title or size of my social group as I am with the morals, ethics, and social conduct I can expect from them. Yes, I am pagan and yes the pagan community has some very serious issues. Yes I am human and yes humanity has some very serious issues. But the confines of my social structure are not based on members of any particular group. Instead, I find people of like minds from a much broader base on which to structure the mutual support and dependency that any social creature requires.

Fortunately, it seems there are many others who feel as I do. You might have noticed that although people at Pagan Nation do bicker from time to time, there is a sense of morals and ethics emerging from the people there. People like Gina ask how it is that a person might do what folk claim Mystie Dragonfly has done. She questions it because she is part of a group of people (Pagan Nation members) who recognizes such conduct as not appropriate in the same way it seems the community at Pagan Nation agreed with the 11 year old’s father that Davin’s conduct was not appropriate. Not a set of morals, ethics and social conduct dictated by a central authority; but a sense of these things established by a consensus of its members. Sure, people with differing views will come and go from Pagan Nation but it seems there is a prevailing sense of social conduct prevails and for that I am glad.

I see the future of the pagan community as becoming more and more diverse. In that movement towards diversity, I see less definition and a loss of any sense of morals, ethics, and acceptable social conduct. But I do not think that is a bad thing because we continue to have the ability to form our own social groups. Some people believe this view to be detrimental to he pagan community, but I think just the opposite. I think the view that all pagans are united in their views is detrimental as it is clear that we are not.

After all, Gavin and Yvonne Frost claim to be Pagan and I have not found many views of theirs that I share. Perhaps a time has come when we should start creating organized religions, groups with clear standards of social conduct, morals and ethics. Not so that these things can be forced upon its members, but such that its potential members can more readily find like minded folk with whom to form deep lasting relationships based on commonalties beyond a desire for a social structure.